Vanilla Sky (2001)

“Forget the critics, VANILLA SKY is a wake up call you don’t want to miss.”

It’s no secret. Tom Cruise lives in a dream world. So when Tom wakes up in a chic Central Park apartment, plucks a stray grey from his fine head of hair and roars downtown in a Ferrari to find the streets of Manhattan completely empty, we know we’re in for a wild ride. Just how wild is a surprise I won’t give away but trust me, you’re going to feel like that guy sitting in front of a TV getting your hair blown back by the force of possibility.

In Vanilla Sky, we never get far from Tom being Tom; he’s an icon of American life, living the American dream —— in life and in the

movies. When Tom keeps getting asked the question, “What makes you happy?” Vanilla Sky pushes a commonplace question onto a mythic plane. Tom embodies the “puer eternus” archetype, the eternal golden boy who never grows up, always on the lookout for the perfect woman. However, the character in this film is getting older, turning a critical thirty-three —— and even though Tom’s surely forty, he looks thirty, doesn’t he? With Tom in the lead, Vanilla Sky has no trouble conjuring up a confrontation with immortality worthy of a god. Heir to the American dream of happy endings and having it all, Tom as David Aames explores a brand new solution for beating the odds that goes beyond meeting the perfect woman.

David Aames burns bright as a familiar stereotype of the spoiled rich kid. In spite of his charm, good looks and his father’s billion dollar publishing empire, he hasn’t found love. David’s father and mother perished simultaneously in a car accident, leaving him at twenty-three with only a corporate board of old fogies to oversee his fun-loving approach to running the company. He treats the whole publishing world as a joke, preferring to play tennis or romp in the sack than attend board meetings. His current girlfriend, Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz) tops the charts as the quintessentially beautiful, blue-eyed blonde. And, though clearly one of long list, she’s seemingly a good match for David’s cavalier attitude about love. She plays his game. We don’t have to reach far for this fantasy. Julie epitomizes a guy’s dream girl, one who makes love like she’s in love —— with no strings attached. We’ve seen that male fantasy hit the dust in other movies but not quite like it does in this one. Even Fatal Attraction might stand aside.

At his birthday bash, David does what David does. He’s single, unattached and looking for love so he doesn’t invite Julie to the party. But she shows up anyway for a little tete-a-tete in the bedroom. Then David’s best friend walks in with an exotic cutie from the other side of the tracks. David meets her eyes across a crowded room and old-fashioned love is in the air. Sofia (Penelope Cruz) has two jobs and a dream of her own. She wants to be a dancer. David’s fascination with Sofia is not lost on Julie. Dressed like a siren in a red dress, Julie’s eyes bore into David’s back as he lights Sofia’s fire. David ignores Julie and takes Sofia home, spending an exquisite night with her doing everything but making love. David deftly avoids sex, which we learn when we discover that all of our viewing of David from the moment he woke up in a dream that morning is a flashback.

David is on trial for murder, incarcerated and wearing an eerie latex mask. He’s answering questions posed by a court-appointed psychologist to determine his sanity. Our perspective shifts. We’re no longer spectators. We’re inside David’s experience. David explains to Dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell) that he was savoring an exquisite edge of tension while he spent the night with Sophia. Even as he ran his thumb along the big question, “is she the one?” he was drawing out the sensual pleasure of the moment. He’s seen the end of love too often, preferring the intensity of anticipation to culmination. As he saunters out of Sofia’s warehouse loft the next morning, Julie drives up. She has an invitation for him. Would he like to hop in the sack with her one more time, satisfy that urge that she knows he’s been building up all night —— one last freebie for old time’s sake before he moves on?

David gives us several delicious moments of deliberation as testosterone struggles with good sense. Men lashed themselves to the mast for a good reason when the sirens sang. But, stereotypes reign. David, in spite of his millions, believes his true power lies in his charm. He can’t resist Julie’s ‘too good to believe’ offer. Imagine, she wants him even though he’s moving on to another woman. Imagine, she’s not judging him. And Julie, in spite of her brains and beauty, can’t stand a smalltime ‘moth’ woman getting her man. She’s played the game; she deserves the prize. She plies all her wiles to draw David into the car with her.

He makes the choice, takes the ride. But then Julie snaps. She gives him a brief peek in what lies beneath the surface when a woman gives her all to a man. She tells him she loves him. But caught up in an egoistic storm of jealousy, her love takes a turn as old as the hills. Julie would rather die than live without him. And, sadly, she does. She drives them off a bridge at eighty miles an hour into a wall of tragedy. David survives, but his face is disfigured, his body broken, his spirit crushed. It’s tough enough to see anyone disfigured but when the victim is an icon of male youth and beauty, a contagion of deep grief invades the heart. Even knowing it’s just a movie didn’t prevent my longing for a restoration of the joy that had just disappeared with that face. Later, Sofia, speaking from a soft voice of wisdom, will say to him, “I wish you hadn’t gone with her.”

David’s down. And we’re only a third into the story.

If you had a billion dollars, would you go to the moon? What makes you happy? How do you get across the line from youth to the long life that lies ahead after you sprout grey hairs, can’t charm the pants off the most beautiful woman in the room and realize money buys everything but love? When we lose the illusion of immortality, we discover an awesome crosshatching of past, present and future realities in our minds that film can allude to even if not capture entirely.

Vanilla Sky crosshatches David’s moment of decision facing that mythic question, “what makes you happy?” with the real, the surreal and just plain vanilla fantasy. We see the good, the bad and the ugly. We respond to visual tricks showing how we make life up out of images that stir our emotions. I myself have walked New York streets feeling the pleasure of a cold morning moment, imagining myself holding Bob Dylan’s arm. I’ve danced at parties feeling Coltrane’s magical presence in the room. I’ve felt childhood needs override good sense. And I’ve dreamt nightmares that woke me up. David tells the psychologist he’ll think he’s crazy if he tells him what happened. Yet, in movies, we accept slipping from one reality to another as perfectly normal. Vanilla Sky offers its fair share of realities.

Sofia’s softly spoken oracle speaks volumes, “Every passing moment is another moment to start over again.” I think Vanilla Sky has something like this in mind when it likens the sky above New York to the sky that Monet painted one day many days ago. It’s a sky full of dreams —— if we open our eyes.